How to find time is today or yesterday in android

I am developing an application for sending SMS. I am storing the current time and showing in the sent history page by retrieving the time from the database. In the sent history page I want to display the time of the message was sent. Here I want to check that the message has been sent today or yesterday or the the day before yesterday like that. If the message was sent yesterday means then I need to display "Yesterday 20:00" like that and even the message was sent yesterday before means "Monday 20:00". I don't know how it has to be done. Please help me if anybody knows.

Solution

You can do that easily using android.text.format.DateFormat class. Try something like this.

public String getFormattedDate(Context context, long smsTimeInMilis) {
    Calendar smsTime = Calendar.getInstance();
    smsTime.setTimeInMillis(smsTimeInMilis);

    Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();

    final String timeFormatString = "h:mm aa";
    final String dateTimeFormatString = "EEEE, MMMM d, h:mm aa";
    final long HOURS = 60 * 60 * 60;
    if (now.get(Calendar.DATE) == smsTime.get(Calendar.DATE) ) {
        return "Today " + DateFormat.format(timeFormatString, smsTime);
    } else if (now.get(Calendar.DATE) - smsTime.get(Calendar.DATE) == 1  ){
        return "Yesterday " + DateFormat.format(timeFormatString, smsTime);
    } else if (now.get(Calendar.YEAR) == smsTime.get(Calendar.YEAR)) {
        return DateFormat.format(dateTimeFormatString, smsTime).toString();
    } else {
        return DateFormat.format("MMMM dd yyyy, h:mm aa", smsTime).toString();
    }
}

Check http://developer.android.com/reference/java/text/DateFormat.html for further understanding.